Gender and History最新文献

This article explores the crucial role of battered women's emotions – both those emotions that were considered legible (like fear) and those that were less immediately understandable (like shame, self-doubt and confusion) – in public responses to intimate partner violence in 1970s Britain. I argue that the status of domestic violence as a real and urgent problem in the years leading up to its criminalization hinged on the identification of innocent female victims whose emotional responses were seen as reliably pointing to unwarranted abuse.

This article discusses the intense struggles over family laws and policies in the early-twentieth century, culminating with the establishment of the Estado Novo dictatorship of 1937–1945. It then analyses letters from ordinary citizens who ask President Getúlio for help in the aftermath of separation from a spouse or consensual partner. These stories are framed by the ‘emotional regime’ and family values that were propagated by the state. Yet the letters also reveal how political tensions and oppositional positions influence their emotional responses and intimate lives.

This article uses deportation case files of the so-called ‘immoral classes’ from 1936 to 1944 to consider the ways that the deportation process was structured around the gendered and ritualised management of emotions. Every deportation hinged on proving that the women were not US citizens; consequently, these cases demonstrate the ongoing gendered nature of women's citizenship. Rejecting women's derivative citizenship and eliciting self-incriminating statements formed the emotional labour of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service agents committed to the operation of the deportation machine. Alienation required nullifying deportees’ motherhood and resulted in separating them from the children.

This article centres on the emotional self and its relationship with the wider structures that it inhabits to understand why middle-class Pakistani women stay in unhappy marriages. While the reluctance to divorce in this setting is often understood as ‘conservatism’, I argue for an understanding that acknowledges how the structures of and repertories around marriage – even when it is unhappy – are anchoring in that they generate emotions, logics and sets of reciprocity and affective ties that make life comprehensible and for a coherent sense of self to emerge. Through a focus on the sharing of stories of marital unhappiness as an ‘emotional practice’, I uncover how the emotions elicited and generated through these narrations guide women and anchor the self, offering an interpretation of what has happened, a way of making meaning of circumstances and, most importantly, a recognition of the labour and endurance through which they have built their lives. Many of the narrative and rhetorical motifs that women draw on in these contexts are those of a self that is subsumed in service to patriarchal family structures. Yet the cumulative self-recognition that emerges through these narratives is of a self that exceeds these normative categories, even as it is dependent on them.

This article analyses the only Jewish girls’ school in nineteenth-century Sweden, Sophiaskolan, and the discussions about girls’ education and Bildung that emerged within the community – including regarding Judaism's ‘Oriental heritage’. The community meetings were a male sphere in which men discussed women's role within Jewish tradition. This implied the ‘de-orientalization’ of Jewish men and how the girls’ school's mission was to shape well-educated mothers that could preserve Judaism and not convert to Christianity, and in doing so shape their children, especially their sons, to become exemplary citizens and thus improve the chances for full political emancipation for Swedish Jews.

This article assesses the gendered experiences of disability and segregation among prisoners in colonial (1830s) New South Wales. I use the distinction between impairment and disability from the ‘social model of disability’ to show that the disabling capacities of impairments varied depending on wider social structures and beliefs, and on each individual's intersectional identity. I draw critically upon the wealth of administrative paperwork generated by the transportation system to illuminate the role of gender in constructing ideas and experiences of prisoner disability in this historical context. The highly imbalanced sex ratio established through penal transportation carried long-lasting effects for ageing emancipists and free residents, and effectively increased the disabling effects of many impairments more substantially for men than women, who stood a greater chance of marrying. Experiments in segregation systems like the Port Macquarie invalid settlement (for men) and Female Factories (for women) had significant long-term impacts on prisoners. However, through quantitative analysis I show that most prisoners entered the broader convict workforce, demonstrating the large extent to which the convict system was able to accommodate individuals with a wide range of physical, mental and sensory impairments.

This article explores the gendered segregation of Victorian mountaineering, highlighting how societal norms sought to confine women to passive roles within the alpine landscape. As Elizabeth Le Blond declared, ‘there is no manlier sport in the world than mountaineering’, encapsulating the pervasive attitudes of the era. Despite such views, several women like her navigated these constraints, forging spaces of resilience and agency. Victorian guidebooks and literature often advised women to avoid strenuous terrains and instead focus on more gentle activities, reinforcing a narrative that segregated their participation. Yet, through travel narratives, artistic depictions and personal accounts, many women subtly subverted these boundaries. This paper also examines the complex relationships between female climbers and local male guides, as evidenced in the writings of Amelia B. Edwards, revealing how these interactions both challenged and reinforced societal expectations. By uncovering these nuanced dynamics, the study argues that while mountaineering was predominantly male-dominated, women played a significant, yet deliberately overlooked, role in its history, negotiating and redefining their place within the mountains.